Wednesday, 18 February 2009

Red haaaaair...

*feels more like myself*

Which is odd, as I've never had red hair before. But there you go.

Also, Peepo drew an amaaaazing picture of Medwin and Or'wenn in a new sketchpad of mine, so now I can never draw in it again until my art skills rival hers. It's basically ruined. The first page has the most adorable, sexy picture on it, and I can never equal it at my current skill level. :/ It would just not be *right* to do my basic doodles on the next page.

They are so cute though it totally makes up for all that wasted paper. I'd show the scan of it, but at the moment it's uncoloured, and she left Medwin's hair empty, so he looks really odd with white hair, so I basically have to wait for a coloured version to hopefully appear on her FP art thread soon.

Sunday, 15 February 2009

*yaaaaaaaaaaaaawn*

*snaps at the fingers of anyone who thought it'd be funny to poke me while I was yawning and vulnerable*

Reeeeading Weeeeek. Sort of busy still, but nominally a holiday. Wooooooo. Okay I am so tired. And I have spent the last few MONTHS being tired, so bear with me until I've slept some of the tired off. I'd say June. :-)

Mahy fat status: Still chubby. Jane said Herstmonceux science centre or the castle or something accepts donations of fish who've outgrown their tanks to put in a pond/moat.

Thursday, 12 February 2009

*sits around in the library*

There's a really weird guy on the computer next to me - he's totally turned his screen around and is sitting all hunched up in the corner away from everyone. Who knows what he could be looking at? Although everyone who's sat on that seat today seems to have angled themselves towards me, as he has, so out the corner of my eye it looks like he's starting at me, and then I realise he's just moved his computer screen around. The other guy who was sitting there was sitting forward, but really far back, and I'm convinced he kept glancing at my screen. Anyway, this dude looks pretty cool - he's got a bobble hat and big glasses and massive earphones. But whatever, it's creepy to have someone sort of not staring at you the whole time *feels watched* I really don't like working in public places like this, especially now I've remembered there's a mumps epidemic going around. But whatever, I'll risk it for my lovely internet connection. I came to sit at the back of the room so there would be no one behind me, even though I doubt anyone would actually care what I'm writing... I'm just paranoid like that.

I woke up stupidly early this morning - eight o'clock... On my day off! Blah! I ended up sitting in bed writing for the next four hours. I really want to work on one of my novels which are all cluttered up on my datastick, but I just don't have the energy. Embers and Elves takes no thinking at all to write, and now Cloud People just feels like some massive effort to work on. Maybe I'll force myself to start doing it at some point, but I just... Can't motivate myself to do it at the moment. Embers and elves is getting massive as well - i haven't done a word count recently, but I know it's huge. It works out about 1000 words a scene, and I'm on 105 now.

*swivels my swivelly chair*

I am actually rather bored... No one seems to be online. Blah. Thursday must be everyone else's busy day. Which isn't fair, because I want people to taaaalk to! I mean, I only walked all the way out here lugging the massive great embers and elves notebook so I could sit somewhere with an internet connection so I could socialise with people who I miss a great deal during the week, and now none of them have the decency to be online!?

*sits in the library and listens to a group of people talking veeeeery slowly through some sort of feminist theory on sexual identity, like they hardly understand the words they're reading, let alone the theories they're talking about* *twitches* this is why I don't really like sitting in libraries... Soon someone's going to start annoying me, by being dumb in a way they really can't help, but is still grating to me.

So let's see, I had another adventure getting back to Chi, as I met Jane in Eastbourne for a shopping trip on the way back. I have now joined the ranks of people wandering around wearing converse-style shoes. perhaps a bit late? I don't know. Don't really care either. They were £4, and my current £3 tennis shoes are now verging on unwearble, never mind permanently damp, so I bought slightly larger shoes, for a slightly increased price. I think, though, that the £3 - £4 quality line marks a sudden increase, before you reach the plateau of not very noticable quality differences between £5 --> over £30 or something, when you can *tell* even crappy style shoes like this are deliberately expensive and well-made, though no one in their right mind would buy them when you can get some in the same style for FOUR FREAKIN' POUNDS. Basically, I've worn these two days now, including a walk through a muddy field (3 times!) and soooo far, the rubber isn't peeling, the laces aren't turning to mush, and they fit my feet nicely still. So woo. Perhaps I will continue hopping onto trends, if they keep turning towards practical. I do maintain though that I should never wear anything that in 5 years time will make me look back and laugh hysterically, so basically all I wear these days is jeans and varieties of jumper and t shirt, as the current fashion trends are laughably awful. As it is I'm a bit dubious about these shoes, as the shape does make me snigger a little, but I figure as long as I keep wearing really long baggy jeans over them, I don't have to keep looking down and seeing I'm wearing them, as all I can see is a perfectly acceptable white rubber toe and black fabric up to my trouser hem, which is about an inch and a half of exposed shoe altogether...

Yeeeah, I did just sit and type about my shoes for like five solid minutes... I'm sort of bored here. I won't start rambling about the other pair of shoes I bought... Yes... Primark is now officially wearing a label of "Amazing!" because it sells so much cheap stuff that is, if you overlook the rather chavvy chains that also pop up in there, pretty decent a lot of the time.

The remaining two boys are back in the house now. Let me illustrate this for you: I've spent 3 1/2 weeks back now, and the kitchen has been pretty nice - I sat in it for most of that time, because it was warm and had an internet connection, and the worse it ever got was a long line of dishes around to about the oven from the sink. I walk in on Monday night, and there is... Just pure, horrible mess on every surface - bowls of uneaten cereal, dirty tomato-stained plates, bowls, pans, trays, mounds and mounds of wrappers and packaging... Jars on the floor, open biscuit packets, bread open and lying around. They'd taken the shelves out of the fridge, and left things like my egg noodles and pancakes on the floor under the counter. It was like they set out to trash it or something, because I honestly can't imagine how it got so bad in what was probably less than the whole weekend. They tidied it all up Tuesday night, but that doesn't excuse the panic attack at it all that I had every time I walked into the kitchen for the rest of Monday and almost all of Tuesday.

Also I will be dying my hair red next time I go home. Woooo. Like proper red, all over. And I think it's permanent too. I may highlight the front with pink if it looks a bit duller than I'm hoping though, as the blonde will still presumably turn up lighter.

*hums* There was something else I was going to say, but I can't remember what now. But yikes, it's four thirty already... I could swear I haven't been here that long.

Sunday, 8 February 2009

Hi Melisende_D_Upheaul! It's been 1408 (wow, that's a big number) days since you joined Xanga... won't you support us by going Premium?Also I'm alarmed that I can totally overlook that little ad bar now. It's like completely invisible to me, even though I'm still using the old home like I was 1600 days ago (back when I started my Gsnurd xanga)...Yeah, I'm at home at the moment, in that lovely little void of Nothing Ever Happens. We went out and saw The Reader at the Hailsham cinema (which is miles away, but apparently the nearest place showing it? It would have been Hawkhurst in the other direction. Says a lot about how lame the Odeon in Hastings is that we have to go out to piddly little towns with publicly owned/agressively independant cinemas to get to see, you know, the big films winning all the BAFTAs?). And I've written a bit of Embers and Elves... Finally printed out the timetable. And I'm aaaaaalmost on Day 4 of typing up, so once again will be on the same day I'm writing in the notebook. I think the days are speeding up as they get used to the schedule, and I run out of tiny minute by minute details that I actually want to repeat. Also, Oasis comes in cans. I totally didn't know this. It isn't even fizzy. It's just Oasis. In a can.

Mahy is so freakin' huge I'm scared he'll climb out the tank and eat me.

Anyway, back to the typing up... I'm getting excited about typing up the Medwin and Or'wenn bit.

Oh, and my Freewebs site spectacularly broke on me, so I ended up completely re-doing it... Which ended up with me having to repost aaaaall of Embers and Elves. So in fact only parts 1-4 are on there now, whereas I was uploading scene 88 when I broke it.

So if you want to read it, now would be a good time to bookmark it. I'll probably do an every other day uploading schedule like I've got on FP. Except this is now way behind. Come to think of it, there are a load of people on FP who probably aren't reading it for being freakishly behind. Maybe I'll stick the link in my signature and advertise the fact I've borked the sight back down to 4 parts.

Friday, 6 February 2009

Back in Haaaaaastings. *clings to it* I can stay here for tonight, saturday, sunday and some of Monday. That is basically half the week. :) Only 2 full days, but 4 in total out of 7 where I am in Hastings at some point of the day. I like this arrangement. Though sooner or later I'm going to be forced into staying to work on essays and projects and stuff. Blah. Make the most of it during Beginning of the Semester Slack Off Time.

Besides, my mum just brought me up some brownies. *is happy and full of chocolate*

Datasticks/stickpins/thumbdrives/memorysticks... What do you call them? *was discussing this with my mum and we thought of just those four variations off the top of our heads* Seems the language can't keep up with the speed at which technology is introduced into our lives. For example, the blurring of whether a "notebook" is any laptop, or a very specific type of laptop. I'd ramble about it more but I'm all distracted and hyper from sugar.

It was weird and sort of cool to catch up with all my webcomics - I had up to four or five strips to read for some of them. This is because I can never remember the web addresses for all but the ones I've been reading since the dawn of time.

Thursday, 5 February 2009

I had a nice post about it on Xanga, but as I'm using IE instead of Firefox, it got totally borked when I copied it over to Blogger. So I'll just put all the photos here in a lump, and then the two ends of the Xanga entry that were nothing to do with the photos. :-P

*eats a Penguin bar and stares at the screen* It's sort of uninspiring being in a library like this. All I've done is type some stuff up since I got here, rather than writing anything new. Have caught up on internets stuff again. I do miss talking to people at random hours of the night though.

So my housemates are discussing buying a proper internet connection. We'd need a landline installed and it would be money, but then we would have internet, and it might be slow because we can't afford much internets, but at least it should be reliably anywhere in the house, if we stick the hub in the hall. I hope we get that soon.

In the mean time, I have Weald and Downlands photos on my datastick! I've only resized them, I haven't messed with the contrast and lighting etc, which is annoying me a little as it was such a dull day, but whatever. here they are.

So anyway, those are some of my pictures, only a whole week and a day after I took them. I don't normally let chaos get me SO badly out of shape when it comes to my procrastination. Hence determindly marching up to the university to procrastinate while we have no internet access at home. I will procrastinate on a schedule if needs be.

Note for blogger: Aaaaargh, IE and Blogger are a terrible combination. Ick. Ick ick ick. I hope I never make another picture post while I am separated from my beloved firefox!

Wednesday, 4 February 2009

Soooo... hi Xanga. :/ It turns out the Van Centre has packed up and moved and a new small car shop has popped up in its place. Important differences:

Van Centre has big vans, Car Place has small cars

Van Centre is run by our landlord and therefore when things break we can appeal for help. I don't think the Car Place Dudes want to fix our boiler quite so much.

Van Centre has a free, unsecured wireless internet connection. Small Car Place has a secured BT connection that is unhackable by teenagers with cheap laptops.

So.

I'm in the library. I think I will be spending a lot of time in the library. I may start paying half my rent to them. This is not ideal, but I only have the best part of a semester left then it's a very long summer, then I will be moving to Bognor. if they can't fix it before then I'll be fine for a few months of this. I think. Having a laptop and my music library gives me a bit more peace of mind than I had back when I destroyed poor Or'wenn in the Noodle Incident. I just don't have MSN, and internet any moment I want it.

Okay, where did I leave you guys? Stuck in Hastings watching the snow fall and thinking, "This is fun!" Me and Simon made a Snow Spike. I had hot chocolate and stuff, and went to bed. 5am I get out of bed, and we go down to the train station in the pitch dark on slippery, snow-covered roads. At the station they say, "Sorry, no trains until 7! Go to Eastbourne!" So we decide to go all the way to Brighton so I don't have to rely on trains until the last leg of the jounrey. Cue interesting drive in the dark, watching the sun rise on the downs, etc. At Brighton we stood around in the cold watching the noticeboards and I began to doubt the sanity of the people of the south coast of England, if this much snow can throw everything so far off whack. Sure it's more than we've seen in most of my lifetime (18 years, so that means I was like 1 or 2 when it last snowed like this, and I wasn't even living in Hastings presumably.) Finally we saw a train to Chichester and I hopped on it, thinking, "Don't get stuck in Barnham! Don't get stuck in Barnham!" (If you remember that is where I spent two hours trapped that weekend I had the Epic Journey Home, when it wasn't snowing, at least...) So we get to Barnham, and we're making good time, and I think I can get to my lecture on time, and then there's this heart-stopping moment as the train engine cuts out in the station, and the scrolling message board goes black, and they're like, "Please listen for train announcements" for a minute. Then finally they announce the train is changing its route... But after Chichester, the next stop. So only 5 minutes delayed and a little shaken I arrive in this pathetic city, and run up to the university, to find it's running half an hour behind schedule. Bleh.

Got through the seminar and went home on the verge of a panic attack, I was so exhausted and fed up and cold and I couldn't feel my feet any more cause i was wearing soaking wet canvas shoes... Once in the house I found it was icily cold, and we had no internet. I had that panic attack while eating a big bowl of pasta (which was pretty interesting), and then dressed up a bit, put on my awesome big stompy boots, and hopped on a train back to Brighton, where I hung out in Waterstones until BlackJack and Rebekah turned up, who are some of my favourite people in the world. Many hours of happy wandering around the lanes feeling so pleased they are now friends passed, with fudge, music shops, and mass goth-spotting. Also our feet all hurt and we were moving like old ladies by the end. I have a new kazoo now. it's bright orange.

We went back to the uni campus, ate sausages and mash, and I went to Write Club with BJ, which was pretty interesting. Everyone wrote really well, and it was fun to workshop writing out loud. I think Tuesdays are my best day for going to Brighton, so I think I will probably go again, and that means I can crash more meetings, and I'll try to bring my notebook next time. Then we watched Black Books for the rest of the evening, and then I went back to BJ's and we passed out until 7. Then there was the whole "argh get an early train with minutes to spare before my lecture" thing again, except we missed the Falmer train, and had to wait around for the next one, and I was convinced I wouldn't make it to my Heritage lecture, but then when I got into Brighton station there was a train to Chi, and I got the fun experience of running in these boots (I swear it was easier than in my trainers, but then for once I wasn't heavily laden down like I usually am at Brighton Station). Once on the train we rumbled off to Chi, and I found I had 15 minutes to spare, so I caught a taxi because at that point I was just Not Bothered again, what with being back in the Doomy City of Cold and Bleh. Made it to my lecture, and it felt pretty good, even if it was mostly what she went over in the sample lecture in Rethinking History last semester.

Anyway, then I got back to the house, found we still had no internet, and Ash was resigned to this fact, if rather annoyed about it, so I sighed, spent a while unwinding typing up some Embers and Elves, snapped when I kept clicking on the Firefox button without thinking, put the Awesome Boots back on, and stomped up to the library to use the internet.

Monday, 2 February 2009

Soooo... I'm still in Hastings. We had freakin' huge amounts of snow - the likes of which I haven't seen in years, and apparently no one else has either... Because the roads became unusuable - if only because of all the noobs on them if you *are* a good driver in the snow, and the trains backed up ridiculously. A result of which was my parents said absolutely no getting on a train to get stuck in Barnham or the likes in the freezing cold for untold hours, depending on how much the trains get borked up by ice on the line. And as no one was expecting this much snow, apparently it means no one was ready for it. It was all over the news how London is completely unworkable in this weather, and Hastings is also near enough to have caught some of the worst (which never happens ) so leaving is the problem - though they did apparently close Brighton uni, so maybe Chi was closed as well... I don't know, I didn't look at the portal page today. But apparently it is better the further west you go. Or something like that. In any case it snowed endlessly all day, and I haven't checked the news or rail website for a good few hours. Anyway, I have to get up at 5am to get to the uni in time for my lecture - I'm determined to go, because it's Creative Writing and I really don't want to miss it... I just don't know how good the rail is going to be when I actually get to the station first thing tomorrow morning... *sighs*

So I did make two different snow men today. And, uh, played a lot of WoW, and not much else really. Bit of a dud day between all the running around "Wow it's snowing!" moments. I probably should have done some reading for Creative writing, but I figure I can do that on the train if I can ever get on one.

Anyway, I figure even if I can't get back to Chi in time for that, I'll make it as far as Brighton to see BJ and Bekah as planned. Even if it means lugging my weekend bag around the whole time as well.

Gah, the snow should not mess everything up as much as this... *sighs* silly unprepared people... No one expects England to get this much snow, I think, so when it does happen it's like, "OMG panic!" and then everyone's headless chickens, and drive planes off the runway in confusion, etc.

*feels sort of sleepy* Maybe I should just go to bed, seeing as I have to get up so early... *siiigh* Feels too far away to worry about now, but it's going to seem way too close when I'm actually at the point where I need to wake up and get to the station.

Sunday, 1 February 2009

So... I'm sort of interested in doing a webcomic, as I may have rambled about quite a lot in the past. Of course, I'm still not the most wonderful artist, but practice is always good, and I can get all my mistakes out the way now... So here is my first full-length comic relating a humous situation what happened about 3 minutes before I opened Artrage and started doodling.

I'll post a thumbnail, and you'll have to click it to see the full-size image - posting it full size on my blog will be pointless as it will just get cut off due to having a theme.

(Edit for Blogger: Wooo! It worked! It worked! *hops around happily* Great, I was worried I'd have to figure out how to link an image on this blogging system, which... Wasn't looking forwards to. :-P)

(As far as I know, Xanga images are open for everyone to see, as Emma uploads all her signatures and art for Fictionpost on Xanga. Pls tell me if you can't see it.)

Suddenly all my deadlines are a lot closer just because it's not January any more... Who cares if it's only 2 days since I last thought about it?

*Is nice and safe at home in my nice warm bubble in front of my computer*

Mahy is noticably fatter than he was before. *pokes the fat fish* I'll have to start drawing him differently. He is almost round.

Also I keep thinking it's Sunday, which is a testament to how weird and different an evening spent at home is to a morning in Chi - they feel like such different days I can't believe that it was only Friday yesterday. I'm here until Monday, as that's when my train ticket is activated and I can use the return. So I actually can't leave Hastings before then. Unless my dad drives me back and I waste all of £3 which was the extra between a single and a long-time return.

Anyway, I'm in a mood for typing up Embers and Elves, so I'm going to do that... Once again I've reached a point where I sort of want to type up everything I've already got before I continue, because once again it feels I'm at a stopping point. It's not that it's a short time since the last one... Just that I've written loads and loads since the last stopping point and covered several really important plot things and basically got to the point where I have actually no real plot to sustain me until the School Trip subplot, but it's okay, cause the more I look at it, the more there actually is to write in the way of subplots... I just need to get my head together and make a list of all the different things that need to be happening around their timetables for the next two days.

Edit: Awww, no, I just remembered I'd resized all my WDOAM photos, went to My Pictures to upload them, and remembered they were all back in Chi. :/ Yaaaay. *sulks*